American and Australian scientists have launched an ambitious project to resurrect the Tasmanian tiger, an animal that went extinct in the 1930s. The striped carnivorous marsupial is officially known as a thylacine and used to roam the Australian bush. The multimillion-dollar project is a collaboration between Colossal Biosciences and Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church. Colossal is a Texas-based biotechnology “de-extinction” company that is also working on a $15 million to recreate the woolly mammoth.

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The project has no time limit but tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm, the founder of Colossal Biosciences, believes the first thylacines could come alive in about 10 years. The timeline for the resurrection of the woolly mammoth is considerably longer since elephants take longer to gestate, CNN reported Lamm as saying.

The project aims at taking stem cells from a living species with similar DNA and using gene editing to turn them into “thylacine” cells, or something closest to them.

Australia’s only marsupial apex predator, the thylacine once lived across the continent. But about 3,000 years ago it came to be restricted to Tasmania. The animal vanished about 2,000 years ago almost everywhere, except Tasmania.

The last known thylacine died in captivity in 1936. Even though there were reports of it being sighted in later years, it was officially declared extinct in the 1980s.

(With inputs from agencies)